A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
The church was still burning when you left it, and it fought you the whole time it died — smoke that stole your eyes, backdrafts that threw you flat, the roof coming down in judgments. Father Lucian burned a vampire to ash with a word and pulled a mace from under his own altar. And then the doors burst, and two vampires landed prone on the stones — thrown — and behind them came Izek, flame roaring off the great arm, guards at his back. You watched those guards die with their names in his mouth — Frederick, no. Not Petru too — and you watched him take a vampire by the skull and promise to destroy it starting with its teeth, and keep his word, twenty feet, into the fire. Sirius put fifty-seven points of the dawn through another. The last one died to Osric’s sword. Six crates came out of that coffin shop. All six are dust now — Muriel’s two, the Father’s one, Sirius’s one, Izek’s one, Osric’s one — and it was not enough.
St. Andral’s is gone. Seventy percent ash, and fourteen houses with it, and dead you have not counted. Sirius walked blind into the collapse to bring the sunburst off the altar, and put it in the old priest’s hands: Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places. And Izek stood staring into the flames with a crack running through everything he has ever believed. The baron promised me. Evil cannot come into Vallaki. The vampires he believes now. The Lady, he cannot. He has gone to report to the Baron — and Fëanor is still the deposit on a promise about proof that comes due tomorrow morning.
Two stories run the streets ahead of you. In one, Lady Wachter has opened her house as a hospital — stocked, you noticed, with far too many bandages for a woman who didn’t know a disaster was coming. In the other, an angel of the Morning Lord came down and named her evil. You know something about that angel that he refuses to know himself.
At the Blue Water, Urwin gave you cloaks, watered dregs, and the worst sentence of the day: your friend — she left. Ernst invited her. Ireena is inside Wachterhaus. You never told her anything. She went as a guest.
So you went in under the chaos, hooded among the refugees, and picked the cellar lock. Behind a pivoting wall: candles, a black pentagram, five chairs — and in one of them a starved survivor of the Reformation Center basement, a man whose crime was chuckling at a festival, who would do anything for the lady who saved him. When you tried to walk him out, the floor birthed skeletons, and they cut him down before any shield could reach him. You never learned his name. You avenged him in bone splinters — and then Drew knelt at the pentagram and found the second knife hidden in the first: it isn’t real. Scratched decoration. No magic in it at all. A staged devil-room, a real ward, a planted witness — built for someone to find. Built, perhaps, for you. And your picked lock and his body are lying in it right now.
You climbed anyway. Past a storeroom, past a kitchen ward where some of the vampire-bitten do not look like they are healing so much as changing. Now you stand in the upstairs hallway of Lady Wachter’s house, unrested and nearly out of everything, portraits and mirrors crowding you with judging looks. Something is moaning behind one door. Every other door says No admittance. And over the stairhead hangs a great map — wolves, the moon, the hill of the goats — that Drew is burning into memory while the house breathes around you.
This is the highest floor you know about. The doors are waiting. Roll quietly — we open them where we left off.